I beat a brain tumor.

I went in for an operation to remove a brain tumor.

I don't want to be brain tumor girl. I don't want this to be my thing.

I had to learn a lot about myself during the situation with my brain tumor.

Too often you see someone fall, break a rib, go in to the doctor and discover a tumor.

Me being me, I put the numbers from my hospital's website from my tumor sizes into a spreadsheet.

Pregnancy is not a disease. The child in the womb is neither a tumor nor a parasite to be destroyed.

I've been through a lot with sickle-cell, but my recovery from the brain tumor was the hardest thing.

I had a tumor in my left eye which killed the optic nerve, but it's my real eye. I just cannot see out of it.

I'm ticking things off my list: I had a tumor removed; I had spinal surgery; I had four surgeries in three months.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

After the brain tumor happened, I realized I love acting, I've always loved it, I may never get a chance to do it again.

Cancer will be with me for the rest of my life, be it as a nodule, tumor or cell someplace, or in my fears and anxieties.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, 'Damn it, the tumor's 10 percent bigger,' before he even said hello.

I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

The idea of printing out something that's as scary as a tumor into its concrete form was something that spoke to me - there is something very liberating about that idea.

Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.

Where does my body end and an invader start? And cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue. How does that happen? Where does medical ability end and start?

Chaga is one of the weirdest mushrooms you may ever see. A fungal parasite found on birch trees, Chaga is a hardened, blackened, crusty formation that looks like a bursting tumor.

A tumor often grows silently and doesn't start making itself known until it's pushing on structures or organs or tissues around it in a way that starts to mess up the whole system.

You've got two veins; one carries blood directly to the body, one carries blood to the heart. That tumor was growing and was pressing on that vein. That vein was getting skinnier and skinnier.

Age is the biggest risk factor for many diseases. You're 100 times more likely to get a tumor at age 65 than age 35. It makes a huge difference. It gives a whole new meaning to preventive medicine.

I was going through some stressful stuff, and I lost feeling in my face and in my tongue. So I went to a doctor. He said he didn't think I had MS or a brain tumor. He said, 'I think you're just stressed out.'

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'

The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

I get really excited about specific therapies, personalized therapies. Like, let's say, taking a piece of someone's tumor and testing a bunch of treatments in a lab and being able to come up with the right therapy for that specific patient.

I was able to get operated on four days after I was diagnosed. It was just a matter of getting this baseball-sized tumor out of me. I reflect now on how lucky I was to be in the situation where I could get the best possible help and treatment.

Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we'll still have cancer, but we'll detect it very, very early, so that it won't kill anybody. We'll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.

That's the trouble with being me. At this point, nobody gives a damn what my problem is. I could literally have a tumor on the side of my head and they'd be like, 'Yeah, big deal. I'd eat a tumor every morning for the kinda money you're pulling down.'

It's been said that mistletoe extract enhances immune function, which increases the production of the immune cells. When administered as a form of therapy for cancer, the extracts are given by injection under the skin, into a vein or directly into a tumor.

Aside from bringing back extinct species, reanimation could help living ones by restoring lost genetic diversity. The Tasmanian devil (aka Sarcophilus harrisii) is so inbred at this point that most species members can exchange tumor cells without rejection.

Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.

Evolution is ultimately why cancer is so deadly. Take two biopsies from different sides of a tumor, and they can be genetically very different, making it that much harder to fight. Variation is the toolbox of evolution, and this variation gives cancer strength.

Unfortunately, my dad had a brain tumor, and my father-in-law passed away from leukemia, so I spend a lot of time on those two causes. I also tend to support military charities like Warrior Gateway, which helps guys transition from combat back into civilian life.

The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

The doctors misdiagnosed me at first - they told me I had a pinched nerve. But my situation was getting worse. The tumor was cutting off the circulation in my nerves. And in two weeks' time, I was left paralyzed. I went from a cane to crutches to a walker to a wheelchair.

I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn't so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn't like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.

This is going to sound crazy, but there was a period of time where on TLC they would show those surgeries - like a woman had a 90-pound tumor, or they separated these twins. And my sister and I - she lived in Ohio when I lived in California - would watch them together on the phone.

When people say there is a 'reason' for the depression, they insult the person who suffers, making it seem that those in agony are somehow at fault for not 'cheering up.' The fact is that those who suffer - and those who love them - are no more at fault for depression than a cancer patient is for a tumor.

I really loved animals when I was little - my friend and I had an imaginary vet's office; we would mime doing surgery on animals. We treated more injuries than illnesses - fixing with a baby bear with a broken leg, removing a tumor. Of course, our surgeries would take about five seconds; that's how good we were.

Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared.

That's a tumor. It goes across my liver, up through my lungs, all the way around my heart. And when they were done trying to cut it out, nuke it out with radiation and chemotherapy it out, it left so much scar tissue that when I walk outside now in cold weather and take a deep breath, it feels like someone is stabbing me.

Having the brain tumor, coming out of surgery and going through all of that, you're like, I am never going to feel the same and I have this new perspective on life. So much gratitude, life just feels like this enormous treasure. Then that kind of just falls away and you're back being grumpy about having an early morning meeting.

I really wish this wasn't a thing. But this tumor is a thing. Even though it's not what I would have chosen for myself, that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be all bad. What I keep trying to remind myself is this is one of those things that looks like a really bad thing on the outside but I know too little about life to be sure.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

With a mammogram - as great as they are, and they do save a lot of lives - if you have very dense breasts, it really can't see if there is something in there. There are other tests, including an MRI, that can really go into the tissue and really see cell formation and hot spots, and that's what you want to see before it becomes a tumor.

Share This Page